Before Ellie White and Natasia Demetriou were mothers, they were mums. In a skit from their 2019 sketch show pilot, the comedy duo play two straight-talking, hygiene-obsessed matriarchs in gilets and camel-toe-accentuating leggings who record lifestyle vlogs from a pristine kitchen while melodramatically referencing the pressures of motherhood. Ever since, the characters have become a core component of the pair’s comic universe, appearing repeatedly in the first proper series of Ellie & Natasia in 2022.
Now the mums are back and moving with the times: reviewing various supermarket white breads – all reassuringly “sterile” options – as car-based food influencers for the show’s second outing. But behind the scenes there has been a bigger shift. The last time they wrote these sketches, White and Demetriou were childless; now they each have two kids.
Coming up with material this time around was a different experience, says Demetriou. “I now feel quite a lot of empathy for these women,” says White. “Well, I always felt empathy – I do with all our characters – but I especially am now like: it is actually quite hard.” Even the housework obsession has become relatable. Nowadays, when Demetriou sees the brand of cleaning product she uses “on offer in Waitrose or Tesco, it is a good day for me. Get three just in case – put them in the cupboard.”
Today, the pair are in their homes, squeezing in interview time while their youngest babies nap. “I may at some point be handed my child and then flap my breasts out for all and sundry to see,” warns White. They both found out they were pregnant again last September, a couple of weeks into the writing process. Three years had elapsed since series one – a gap they attribute to scheduling issues (both are successful actors; Demetriou is best known for 35-time Emmy-nominated vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows, while White’s recent credits include Black Mirror, Wonka and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy) – but this new biological deadline meant “it was now or never,” says White. “We had to write it very quickly and film it very quickly so that we wouldn’t give birth when we were filming.” (White ended up going into labour halfway through the edit.)
Shooting while heavily pregnant did pose a few challenges. In some sketches, their stomachs are disguised with voluminous clothes or behind furniture (a pro for Demetriou: “I love acting sitting down, so if you can sit me behind a table I’m the happiest I’ve ever been”). In others, they are incorporated into the premise: the pregnant-again mums do a maternity fashion segment, while the duo’s other long-running sketch, Internet Nails, sees the titular shonky North Circular beauty salon diversify into pregnancy treatments as the owners prepare for motherhood themselves.
Still, says White: “We didn’t want it to be ‘the pregnant show’.” Demetriou agrees: “We just wanted it to not be a distraction.” In fact, series two mostly feels like business as usual for the duo, who tend to combine offbeat yet scalpel-sharp observational humour (see: their “special moments with special people” strand, a kaleidoscopic showcase of modern smugness) with an overfamiliar rapport and penchant for dressing up as off-putting men and eccentric old women that is very French and Saunders, a programme Demetriou grew up “absolutely living for”.
White, who is 37 and grew up in Oxford, and Demetriou, 42 from north London, met through the latter’s younger brother, Jamie, who had been in a comedy troupe with White at Bristol university. The women quickly bonded, but it wasn’t until a producer friend urged them to combine forces that they formed a double act. Demetriou had been doing a “Greek character who was trying to sell pizza to nightclubs” on London’s alternative comedy circuit, while White was performing as an extremely nervous beauty pageant contestant. When they merged the two on stage, it was “one of the most electric nights of my life”, says Demetriou.
Those two characters became the Sexy American Girls, two vaguely eastern European women trying and failing – captivatingly – to embody turn-of-the-millennium celebrity glitz, who in turn evolved into the Internet Nails duo. In the latter, Demetriou plays the imperious Donna, who reels off hypnotic word salad about their services – they offer to style your baby with a “rocker chic lifestyle mixed with denim highlights and zip attachments, cowboy essentials mixed with international rap monger” aesthetic – in grainy VHS footage while her cousin Nikki (White) vibrates with shyness beside her.
This misguided pursuit of glamour is an extraordinarily rich seam for the pair, who bring a similar energy to Sophie and Katia, the pop stardom-chasing pals they play in Jamie Demetriou’s superb Channel 4 comedy Stath Lets Flats. Demetriou puts this through-line down to the fact that “me and Jamie and Ellie all have a very similar sense of humour and similar reference points. We grew up in the 1990s, when the coolest things were all American: Coca-Cola, Mickey Mouse.” That this kind of Americana now seems so lame and dated adds another layer of comedy. But there is also a nostalgia: it’s an opportunity for Demetriou to channel the “stupid teenage girl” she once was; “constantly doing an American accent, practising conversations in the mirror with boyfriends you don’t have”. White agrees. “It reminds me of being a 14-year-old and taking yourself” – and your creative enterprises – “really seriously. And just being like: well, we are really good.”
That said, the pair are no longer living out any pop star fantasies. Highlights of series one included riffs on morose Adele-style ballads, jet-setting rappers and – most pointedly – musicians who infantilise themselves to a disturbing degree (see: the song about being a dummy-sucking “sexy baby”). This time around, however, there aren’t any musical parodies. “For some reason, we just couldn’t come up with an idea,” says Demetriou. The demise of the monoculture was partly to blame. Sketch shows of yore, such as French and Saunders, were able to pastiche things “the whole country’s watched”, but nowadays there are far fewer shared references. As such, White feels culturally “trapped in 2011. Can we do a Little Mix parody? It’s like, well, they broke up years ago.”
Instead of specific spoofs, White and Demetriou often make fun of broader movements in the zeitgeist, especially forms of social media content, from “day in the life” videos to visual podcasts to OnlyFans-esque livestreams. That these sketches could slip undetected into someone’s Instagram feed also means a higher chance of viral success. “You do sort of want these things to look like something you’d come across online,” says White. “We want it to almost be like, is that real?”
Yet parodying social media tropes comes with its own drawbacks. “I know everyone says this at every time in history, but it does feel like everything’s been done because the internet is so vast,” says Demetriou. The pair were planning a sketch about two fashion content creators from the deep south until White discovered the “real” version online. “There’s a woman who stands there with these absolutely baffling outfits, being like: ‘You gotta wear a long scarf! It falls to the floor and it makes you feel incredible about yourself.’ And I was like, what is this sketch actually adding?”
When it comes to added comic value, however, White and Demetriou tend to deliver the goods. A case in point: their appearance on the last season of Last One Laughing UK, the reality gameshow in which comedians compete to see who can remain straight-faced the longest. The duo did a cameo as intimacy coordinators (sporting, incidentally, mum-coded Essex accents and short layered hairdos), who were sent on set to attempt to crack the remaining contestants.
Despite an incredible five minutes of half-improvised comedy, which included discreetly asking Romesh Ranganathan if he knew what “s-e-x” was, they didn’t make anyone laugh. “I’m not kidding when I say it was the most nervous I’ve ever been in my entire life,” admits White. “It was sort of like your worst nightmare.” Not only were they in a room of comedy legends (Bob Mortimer, David Mitchell), but the silence they encountered felt like it was going against “all normal forms of British society”, says Demetriou. Usually we “nod politely and go ‘Brilliant!’” in response to even lacklustre attempts at humour. Here, “Not even a smile!”
Speaking of politeness, we have now reached the end of the interview and those babies haven’t made a peep. “I’m slightly worried. He’s been sleeping for a really long time,” says White, bemusedly. At least we’ve been able to talk freely about their return to TV sketch comedy. It is, after all, a real treat to have White and Demetriou – and all the many mums they play – back on our screens again at last.
